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‘Yes, Virginia. There Is A Santa Claus’

The loving response to an age-old question published in a 1897 edition of "The New York Sun" continues to shed a light of hope, even in an economically and emotionally wrecked world.

By Christina Bramlet | Updated on November 28, 2011

This month’s title borrows from an editorial that appeared in the Sept. 21, 1897 edition of The New York Sun. Its genesis? The pen of an inquisitive 8-year-old girl whose schoolmates had declared that Santa was an elaborate fabrication. (We’ve all faced the same crushing revelation, right?)

At the time, The Sun was a prominent New York City newspaper, and when the girl approached her father, he famously said that, “If you see it in The Sun, it is so.” Her inquiry eventually wound up in the hands of Francis Pharcellus Church, an editor at the paper. One might imagine that, through the eyes of a child, the newsman’s last name only gave further credence to his soft, thoughtful words. Church took pleasure in addressing the question’s underlying philosophical issues and how the young naysayers were obviously “affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age.” He eloquently said, “There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence” and that man—in intellect and being—is merely “an ant” or a speck in a vast universe.

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